


Miles Up

by alcoholandregret



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: M/M, i don't know what this is, mikeys gay awakening.dox, nate tolerates so much
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-08
Updated: 2018-03-08
Packaged: 2019-03-28 13:15:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13904772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alcoholandregret/pseuds/alcoholandregret
Summary: In his experience - which he has a lot of, thank you very much - movies where the main character ends up with their best friend follow a pretty straightforward path. Usually it doesn’t go like this: an evidently unnecessary gay crisis, a dozen or so online personality quizzes, questioning every friendship you’ve ever had, and a weird turn through morse code.





	Miles Up

**Author's Note:**

> Title from [Drunk & High by Got Me So Hi](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiJ8HDnIrYU)
> 
> sorry about the morse code but I promise it is all explained in the fic

Mikey isn’t Ryan. Which, okay, duh, but that’s mostly just to say Mikey, like, exists on the internet. Granted, it isn’t as much as Nate and certainly not as much as some of their teammates, but that’s not the point. The point here is he probably could have continued to live in ignorant bliss forever and  _ not _ had some kind of crisis if he  _ were _ Ryan, but then again, he wouldn’t have a boyfriend, so maybe this is one of those “the ends justify the means” kind of things. 

So, standing hand in hand with Dylan at the top of a long and very confusing staircase, he can turn around and look down it at the steps they’d taken and… they make no sense at all. Especially considering he doesn’t remember starting the ascent, only approaching the end of the long, plateaued landing he’d - apparently - been stuck on for ages.

We’ll start there.

“I mean,” Dylan says, flopping over the arm of the chair Mikey’s sat in, “I had fifteen chicken nuggets, but I wasn’t happy about it.”

“That sounds great, though,” Mikey laughs and shoves Dylan’s face away, nearly causing him to fall off the furniture. “Why weren’t you happy about it.”

He swats Mikey’s hand away when he goes to push him again. “I wasn’t hungry.”

“Bullshit.”

Dylan shrugs.

Their summer is practically half over, now, and it really sucks, because it feels like he hasn’t had really any time to see Dylan or Nate after being so far away from them for several months. So, maybe not all that far from Nate, but Dylan could have been on an entirely different planet and Mikey wouldn’t have even known. Truly, the only evidence to support him still being on earth was all the records Mikey got to hear about him breaking - wishing he could  _ see _ them instead. Then again, maybe that was some kind of clone Dylan, and-

Mikey pinches his cheek.

“Ow.”

“Okay, you’re real.”

Dylan squints at him, but laughs anyway, “you’re so fucking weird, Clouder.”

Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t, but who’s Dylan to judge? He’s the one that puts up with him, so  _ obviously  _ that makes him weird too. That’s probably how it works, anyway.

“Maybe so.”

Dylan rolls his eyes and then off of Mikey entirely, landing on the floor with a soft thud. 

“Why?”

“I have no legs.”

So, that’s definitely how it works.

Dylan doesn’t leave until the middle of the night when he was fairly certain that if he stayed in Mikey’s bed one moment longer he’d “fall asleep and not wake up for at  _ least _ a week.” Mikey doesn’t think his mattress that much more comfortable than Dylan’s, but he was also tired and content enough tangled together under three blankets that he could probably say the same thing, so.

In fact, he’s a lot colder after he leaves, so it takes him a long time to finally fall asleep despite how drowsy he’d been.

Between training and needing to leave for rookie camp and then coming back for the short period of time before the preseason starts, he doesn’t get to see Dylan much at all. He misses summers spent together, attached at the hip. Granted, he hasn’t had that since Dylan left for Erie and then Mikey going to the O too, the two of them making their own friends, but still.

They make time for each other, always would, probably -  _ definitely _ if Mikey had anything to do with it - but it’s not the same. 

He shouldn’t complain, because he loves all his friends, but he’s known Dylan for so long, it’s weird to be able to pinpoint times and events that changed the time they spent together. He just hopes it doesn’t continue to the point where they hardly speak, let alone anything else.

But that’s neither here nor there, and he knows he’s definitely being pouty because Nate has plans until the afternoon, and Dylan’s camp doesn’t end until tomorrow, so Mikey’s got pretty much nothing to do for, like, the whole day, and it just feels like a waste.

Going on Insta the moment he woke up was apparently a bad idea, but in his defense, he had nothing better to do, the people he’d be talking to instead were all busy, and he didn’t think it would lead him down the path he’d ended up on. Which, honestly, he couldn’t even duplicate it if he tried, because he started on his feed, and when he got caught up, moved to explore, then clicked some links and more and more and then-

And then he spent nearly a full hour scrolling through Ryan Reynolds’ photos.

And like, okay, ask literally anyone - he’s always been good at recognising when guys are attractive, because he isn’t  _ blind,  _ but something about this was new. More so, everything is. He’s seen Deadpool, right, he knows Reynolds is hot but uh.

He texts Nate even though he said he wouldn’t bother him until at least four in the afternoon. 

_ Nate help _

Nate, who, really didn’t have to reply to this, comes to the rescue like he always does. 

_ What’s up _

He sends a screenshot of the most recent post, and captions it, _ the things I wouldn’t let him do to me holy shit _

_ What the fuck do you want me to do about that _

He doesn’t know, but Nate sends another text before he needs to reply.

_ Same though _

_ What _

_ I am so confused  _

So is Mikey, but like, for a lot more reasons than just this conversation.

He does what any logical person would do in this situation: turns to cliche online tests, and through seven of them, forty-five minutes, and layers and layers of denial, he texts Nate again, in a panic.

_ Dude I think I might like guys too _

_Are you._ a pause and then _Michael._

_ What? _

His phone rings, and when he answers it, Nate sighs. “What are you on about?”

Saying it out loud feels a little more real, and he’s still trying to let it sink in, so he’d kind of rather just not. “I said exactly what I meant.”

“Are you fucking with me?”

That… hurts a little. Sure, maybe it was knee-jerk to go to Nate for this, but that’s because he trusts him on it. He trusts Nate with everything, so to be just… He doesn’t know. But it doesn’t feel great.

“No, Nate, I’m not  _ fucking _ with you,” he says with more heat behind it than intended.

“Hey,” he replies softly, “I’m sorry.”

“Why would I be, like, joking about this.”

There’s a long pause, and then Mikey is taken aback when Nate says, “I thought you already knew.”

Taken aback is kind of a loose term for it, though, because it’s more like Mikey shuts down entirely, only managing to let out “what?”

“I-” he starts and stops himself. “Mikey, we’ve talked about guys pretty much the whole time we’ve been friends.”

“Not like that!”

“I don’t know how to tell you that straight people don’t generally spend hours rating NHL players’ asses.”

“Well who is going to argue that Crosby’s is a ten.”

“No one, but buddy that is not the point at all.” 

He knows this. He’d like to avoid that.

“But. So. You?”

“Oh my god. Yes, Mikey. But so me.”

Oh.  _ Oh. _

“I didn’t know,” he says, barely above a whisper.

“Clearly,” Nate replies, not unkindly.

“I don’t… What do I do now?”

“I have to go, but I’ll come over when I can, okay? We can talk about it then.”

“Okay,” he sighs. It’ll probably be good for him to think about it anyway. Or not think about it. That seems like it’d be more fun. Definitely easier. “Love you.”

“Lo-”

“Wait,” he rushes to say, “I don’t mean like-”

“Jesus Christ,” Nate interrupts and hangs up, and Mikey is left staring at his ceiling, the results of the last test he’d taken still up on his laptop screen.

What a fucking day.

Nate, to his credit, is a lot of help and manages to get Mikey to calm down a lot. They don’t really talk about it ever unless Mikey wants to bring it up, just continuing business as usual. 

He does notice, though, that business as usual should have been a pretty big pink purple and blue flashing neon sign. 

Nate thinks it’s pretty fucking hilarious when he brings that up one night, in the middle of their season with Bing, while they’re eating mac and cheese in the apartment that they share as they watch Deadpool 2. Watch being used loosely, because they just spend most of the movie talking about. Well. 

“Yeah, no shit. Honestly, I would have thought Dyls would have been a pretty big indicator if nothing else.”

“Dyls?” Mikey asks through a mouthful of food. 

“Yeah?” Nate looks at him, again, like it’s some kind of obvious thing he should understand immediately. Which he doesn’t. Because no offense to Dylan, like, he loves Dylan, but if it took  _ Ryan Reynolds _ for Mikey to check his shit, how the hell was  _ Stromer _ supposed to be the nail in the coffin.

“I don’t follow.”

“You’re-” he stares at him, like he’s waiting for him to break, like it’s a  _ joke _ that he doesn’t understand again, and when Mikey shakes his head, Nate sighs loudly and puts his face  _ in _ his bowl.

He pokes his shoulder. “You’re going to get cheese on your forehead.”

Nate sits up and gives him a look. “I really don’t know where to begin with you, Mikey.”

“You could, like, start with what you’re talking about.”

“Do you really not have big gay feelings for Dylan?”

“No?” he says slowly, because what? Why would he have… “Oh.”

“Oh?”

He puts his bowl on the coffee table, shouting “pause the movie,” on his way into his room to get his laptop. He collapses back onto the couch and opens it up, ignoring Nate’s laughter when he turns back to his tried and true problem-and-crisis-solving method.

A half dozen or so tests later, and he sighs in defeat. “I guess I do.”

“You’re really something else.”

He doesn’t stop thinking about it, though, not through the rest of the movie, or getting ready for bed, or even when he lays down to sleep. 

The being into guys thing was easy enough to deal with, because beyond the shock of realising it, it isn’t like that changed anything. But actually having  _ feelings _ for one, his best friend to boot, was a whole other can of worms. Mostly because he’d been pretty sure all of the shit he’d felt towards Dylan was just how people feel about their friends, but probably not.

He probably shouldn’t have read the paragraphs after each and every bold ‘you totally are!’ that met him at the end of every test, because now they’re all he can think about.

_ Maybe you just need to think about it,  _ Mikey’s brain won’t stop repeating,  _ because maybe you’ve been overlooking your own feelings. _

“Stop,” he says quietly to his dark room. He just wants to sleep.

_ Relearn-  _ “please,” he’s desperate, now, pressing his pillow to his ears. 

_ what it’s supposed to be like. _

He calls Nate, who answers practically immediately despite the fact that it’s two in the morning and Mikey is one room over.

“Nate what if I’m like in love with you too because I don’t want that,” he says all in one breath the moment it connects, continuing before Nate can answer. “Like I love you Bas but one thing at a time and also no offense or anything but I don’t think I want to even kiss you or anything which would make-”

“Mikey,” he sounds dead tired, and whether that’s because of the hour, Mikey likely waking him up, or just his general ‘you’re being an idiot’ tired, well, it’s hard to tell.

“Yeah?” he sounds small, even to his own ears.

“Generally speaking,” okay, so definitely ‘you’re being an idiot’ tired, “if you don’t want to be in love with someone, you probably aren’t.”

Oh. Yeah. He hadn’t considered that.

“But like, say I  _ was-” _

“Sure.”

“Would you hate me?”

“I hate you right now for waking me up for this.”

“Nate, please-”

“No, Mikey. I wouldn’t hate you for it, you know that.”

Yeah. Yeah he does.

He apologises for waking him up, thanks him, and hangs up, feeling kind of like an idiot. Or maybe a lot like an idiot. 

It’s late, and he’s exhausted in pretty much every single way a person  _ can _ be exhausted, but that doesn’t mean his brain will stop running thought marathons very loudly. So, despite how tired he is, and how very much he doesn’t want to, Mikey slows himself down and tries to rationalise with himself, sorting thoughts into little boxes.

There’s the  _ girlfriend _ box, the  _ Dylan _ box, and, for comparison, the  _ Nate  _ box.

This feels stupid, like, deserving of chirps for the rest of his life stupid, but he’s also pretty much out of options. 

The more he goes through things, more and more goes into the Dylan box, and it ends up being a combination of the two others, which makes sense, and is a relief in some ways. The amount of things the Nate box shares with the girlfriend one is pretty slim, at least.

His phone goes off, and when he sees that it’s Dyls, his stomach flips. Another one for just the Dylan box.

_ its 3am and I decided I am going to learn morse code _

Of course he did.

_ Go to sleep dyls _

_ -.-- --- ..- / --. --- / - --- / ... .-.. . . .--. _

Mikey sighs and searches for a translator, sighing again when it comes back ‘you go to sleep.’

_ I’m trying _

_.-.. .- -- . _

He doesn’t bother going into the translator for that.  _ Stop it. _

_ -. --- _

_ That says no doesn’t it _

_ -.-- . … _

_ I hate you so much _

_.. / .-.. --- ...- . / -.-- --- ..- _

That one he translates, and he officially puts  _ willing to use morse code for _ in the Dylan box when he replies in kind,

_.. / .-.. --- ...- . / -.-- --- ..- / - --- --- _

because he does. He really,  _ really _ does love Dylan. Even though he does shit like this. 

Maybe  _ especially  _ because he does shit like this. Who knows. He’s still working on that.

It’s pretty stupid that they’re doing this instead of sleeping. It’s pretty stupid when he ends up pulling up a picture of the morse code alphabet so he doesn’t have to keep using the translator. It’s pretty stupid when it gets to the point that they’ve been doing this for almost two hours, the sun will be rising soon, and he types out

_.. -- / .. -. - --- / -.-- --- ..- / -.-- --- ..- / -.- -. --- .-- _

It’s very stupid when he nearly cries when he gets left on read.

“He probably fell asleep,” Nate tells him on their way to practice the next day. “Like  _ you _ should have been.”

“We don’t have a game today, it’ll be fine.”

“So will you.”

“He _ read  _ it, Nate. I told him I was into him and he _ read _ it and didn’t respond.”

“Well, to be fair, you told him in fucking morse code.”

“He started it!”

He nearly sleeps his way through practice, and he can tell coach notices, but he’ll make it up at the practice tomorrow by working extra hard. He’s allowed an off day, especially when the next game isn’t for two days.

He and Nate get back into Nate’s car, and Mikey’s phone goes off, and he’s not awake enough to even realise who it was that texted him as he opens up his messages and there, right below his blue bubble, is a grey one, the message matching exactly.

_.. -- / .. -. - --- / -.-- --- ..- / -.-- --- ..- / -.- -. --- .-- _

‘I’m into you, you know.’

No. No he did not and he wouldn’t have ever thought, but then again he wouldn’t have ever thought that  _ he’d _ say that either, so-

_ Holy shit really,  _ he replies, his thumbs working faster than his brain, and he’s like, trying so hard not to get too excited.

_ Yeah dude _

Mikey shoves his phone in Nate’s face, who swats it away. “I’m fucking driving, Mikey."

Nate’s driving, and they’re going, like twenty-five, but Mikey’s going probably closer to a thousand miles an hour. Holy shit.

In his experience - which he has a lot of, thank you very much - movies where the main character ends up with their best friend follow a pretty straightforward path. They generally go something like this. Main character wants to date this really popular person or something, and they find out that that person is, like, an asshole or whatever, and they realise their best friend had been there the whole time or they save them from themselves or - well, those circumstances are generally a little different. The point stands, though, the plot is generally the same. 

What he means to say, here, is that usually, it doesn’t go like this: evidently unnecessary gay crisis, a dozen or so online personality quizzes, questioning every friendship you’ve ever had, a weird turn through morse code, all to end with. Well, with this.

Dylan steps out of his car, and they definitely pick up the pace a little when they go from walking toward each other to pretty much running by the time they meet in the middle, the impact of the hug making them spin around, Mikey on his heels. Dylan’s laughing in his ear, and he can feel it in his chest, and it bubbles out as his own laugh, and the past couple months of talking about this moment melt into his bones and he’s so excited.

He loves his boyfriend,  _ so _ very much.

There’s definitely a lot more stairs in front of them, and maybe his staircase ends without Dylan, but for right now, he can look back on the ones he nearly tripped over or missed completely, and think about how there’s one more he’s been waiting to climb for for a while now.

Dylan must be thinking the same thing, because they pull apart just enough to lean back in at the same time, in sync as always, and it isn’t sparks and fireworks, just another kiss, but this is with  _ Dylan,  _ so it’s already different - read: better - so it’s okay. 

It was a step they’d been missing, anyway.

“This is just like Sky High,” Nate muses from the porch and Dylan laughs.

“Dude,” Mikey shakes his head and turns slightly to look at him. “how.”

“You’re dating your best friend?” he says, like it’s obvious.

“I think you’re missing some important parts of that movie, Nater.”

**Author's Note:**

> So it's like an hour late but this was supposed to be for Dylan's birthday which is kind of funny because Dylan is hardly in it but look. I had 5 hours and I tried my absolute best. Not to mention I never even finished the fic intended for Mikey's birthday, so at least this one got done.
> 
> As for. Literally anything that happens in this? I don't know. I have no fucking idea. But thanks for reading it anyway
> 
> And I really was so very lazy editing it that I. didn't
> 
> catch me on [twitter](http://www.twitter.com/alcoholnregret) and [tumblr](http://www.sidnate.tumblr.com)


End file.
